The evening of Thursday, May 24 was a date to remember as Luxe Interiors + Design Magazine hosted the first Barkitecture design competition and auction at the Seattle Design Center. Conceived as a benefit for the Seattle Humane Society and Seattle Children’s PlayGarden, the event showcased the designs of ten teams, each comprised of an architect, builder, interior designer and landscape professional. Simultaneously, a Parade of Dogs Costume show was held. The evening climaxed with a live auction of the designer dog houses.

I am very proud to report that I was landscape architect for “Team Ripple,” led by architect Jim Dearth of Ripple Design Studio. I’m even more proud to report that our “Bau-Wau Haus” entry won the competition in the “Best Work of Art” category. Our design concept was based on the idea that the fashionable Modern Small Dog tends to eschew outdoor dog “houses” in favor of portable indoor crates, so we designed a sleek and artful dog crate that can be used both indoors and outdoors. The crate serves both as a bed for doggie and as an elegant bench for the doggie’s human (translation: what we would call the dog’s “master,” but you and I know that term is highly inaccurate!) Jim Dearth’s subtle design features a limestone bench seat for the human and a comfy aqua-colored bed and spring-green pillow specified by interior designer Gregory Carmichael. The crate’s walls and doors are akin to a woven fabric of Ipe dog bones, precisely cut by a computer and mounted on stainless steel rods. Curving bamboo-plywood cabinets from Teragren bracket the piece, providing space for dog bowl, leash and treats.

My landscape setting for “Bau-Wau Haus,” could have a name of its own: “Dogj Mahal!” Jim’s architecture resides in a nine-tray grid at the center of a cross-shaped paved walk in a plaster finish by Gail Miller, which looks like a miniature plaza. The overall composition is anchored at the four corners by Podocarpus macrophyllus trees from L & B Nurseries, commonly known as Yew Pine, which serve as abstract live minarets. The trees are set in tapering silver-gray fiberglass pots by CG Products. Beneath the trees, diagonally alternate grid cells are paved with aqua-colored recycled glass chips from Bedrock Industries and decorated with art glass bones by Sherri Gamble of Sage Artistry. The opposite diagonal grids are carpeted with a soft ground cover of Sedum hispanicum (Spanish Sedum) from T & L Nurseries.

Our Bau-Wau Haus sold for $1700 at auction to a happy couple who share their Pioneer Square condominium with two Chi-hua-haus.

Bau-Wau Haus would not have existed were it not for the fine craftsmanship of our excellent builder, Chris Brooks of Prestige Custom Builders, who had only about four weeks to execute the design. Here’s to Chris and Prestige!

Here’s a link to a video of May 24’s “Barkitecture” event at the Seattle Design Center, sponsored by the Seattle edition of “Luxe Interiors + Design Magazine.” I designed the landscape for Team Ripple ‘s entry, “Bau-Wau Haus,” which won the award for Best Work of Art in this whimsical upscale doghouse design contest and auction. See recent blog posts for more information. The video was produced by Sotheby Realogics, the official realtor for the doghouse auction, and I’m pleased to report that “Bau-Wau Haus” sold at auction to an urban couple with two Chi-hua-huas. The summer 2012 issue of Luxe will include an 8 page spread on the designs and the dog costume contest.

The Volunteer Park Reservoir re-envisioned as a reflecting pond with cascading edges and model boats.

As it celebrates its first centennial this summer, Volunteer Park is at a historic crossroads. On May 31, 2012, the Friends of Seattle’s Olmsted Parks (FSOP) hosted a meeting of Capitol Hill citizens, businessmen and park neighbors at the Seattle AsianArt Museum to garner support and feedback for creating a trust to manage and maintainVolunteerPark. As past president of FSOP, I was one of four presenters at the well-attended event, and the proposal was greeted with enthusiasm. Capitalizing on momentum from the park’s designation as a City landmark last fall, FSOP has been working closely with the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation (SPR) and the Seattle Parks Foundation in recent months to explore the concept, which addresses five pressing needs facing the park.

First, in an era when DPR’s budget for parks maintenance has been cut back severely due to the recession, a trust would assure a dependable and ongoing source of funding and also exceed today’s reduced funding level. Second, within the next two years the reservoir is slated to be de-commissioned or lidded to meet new federal guidelines. Meanwhile, the museum will be closed for well more than a year, and possibly several years, while delayed safety and seismic improvements are made to the structure. Fourth, the Conservatory’s operations funding has been threatened by City budget cuts at a time when a capitol improvement program to replace the aging wood structural skeleton with a new aluminum matrix has been stalled, also for insufficient funds. Lastly, the park is in need of new and replacement planting to restore the layers of tree canopy, understory shrubbery and ground covers that were part of the original Olmsted planting design concept. SPR is currently designing the new plantings, following the original Olmsted planting plan, but there are no funds available for implementation.

Creating a trust could pump new resources and social energy into all five of these separate areas of need by unifying them within an over-arching program to manage the park for the next 100 years. Many synergies are to be had, not least of which is re-activation of daytime and especially summer evening events in the park, such as concerts and plays. Shared programming between the museum, conservatory, band stand and even the water tower could expand enthusiasm for what is actually a miniature cultural center within the park. At the same time, the trust will help foster public awareness that the park itself is the real jewel, not merely its component buildings and institutions.

In the coming months, FSOP and SPR will be studying several models of parks conservancies around the United States to figure out which model works best forSeattle. We will also be working on an even broader goal – to create an Olmsted Trust, covering all the Seattle Olmsted parks and boulevards. It is expected that the Trust for Volunteer Park will be housed within that umbrella organization. If you’re interested in more information or in “Volunteering for the Park,” please send an e-mail to volparktrust@gmail.com.

As a Seattle residential landscape architect and garden designer, I am always consulting with homeowners about whether to remove or preserve large trees on their property. Many times on a first visit to their garden, people will tell me, “That Cedar is going. I’ve already called to have it removed.” Among the candidates for removal, large specimens of our native Western Red Cedar and the exotic Deodar Cedar seem to top the list. And the motivations for the planned removal are certainly understandable. Mainly, they boil down to four basic reasons:

I’m afraid that tree is going to fall on my house and power lines.

It’s so messy, I’m always cleaning my gutters and it drops leaves and seeds all over my car.

My back yard is too shady – I just want a sunny garden.

Those trees are blocking my view.

But should a towering Cedar automatically be removed because one of its limbs fell in the last wind storm or should a giant Oak tree be removed because grass won’t grow under it? I have often counseled people to remove a tree or trees due to crowding or disease – none more so than mature Cherry trees, which are highly susceptible to many diseases — or to open up views. But unless that Cherry tree looks like it’s rotting from 30 feet away, I also encourage them to consider the other option, to preserve the tree.

Why should you think twice before removing a large tree? For three main reasons: First, because Seattle has lost over 30% of its tree canopy since the 1970’s, and you can clearly see the effects of this change by comparing current and past aerial photos of the city. Second, because there is enormous value to individuals and society in the urban forest that we are losing. The evidence is overwhelming that trees moderate heat gain on hot summer days, mitigate climate change by storing carbon dioxide, and provide desperately needed wildlife habitat.

But if these two reasons seem abstract and altruistic to you, consider the third reason: as I always put it, trees are a gift to the neighborhood. What attracted you to your neighborhood in the first place? Wasn’t it at least partly the leafy streets and the tall backdrop of greenery surrounding the houses? Sometimes a giant tree can even be a neighborhood landmark. Seattle’s most attractive neighborhoods feature lush front gardens and towering mature trees. Neighborhoods in surrounding communities such as Mercer Island,Bellevue and Redmond are appealing because they still feel like they are nestled in the native forest. When too many of these urban trees are cut down to make way for larger houses that “maximize the lot,” the net effect is to lose the landscape appeal of the entire neighborhood.

The entire tree is much less likely to fall than one or more of the limbs. Why not hire a consulting arborist to assess the tree’s hazard and consider removing a few limbs rather than the entire tree?

Trees can be messy. I know, because I live under Bigleaf Maple trees, and you can’t convince me that there is any messier tree in existence. But why not park your car in the garage and hire someone to clean out the gutters on a regular basis?

Sometimes the only way to obtain a nice sunny patch for your morning coffee or afternoon wine is to remove a tall tree, but many times there is another part of your property, say in the front yard, that is sunny and with new landscaping can be converted into a private sanctuary. Meanwhile, ground covers can be planted under that Oak or Cedar to create a beautiful shade garden.

Views are actually enhanced by trees, which provide the foreground interest and framing for the most beautiful Pacific Northwest vistas. Panoramic views without foreground trees can feel somewhat bland and two-dimensional, like a painted theater backdrop. Often to create or enhance a view, it is enough to open a “window” in a tree by removing a few key limbs that block Puget Sound or Lake Washington and the mountains.

Cass Turnbull of Plant Amnesty (www.plantamnesty.org) has made a career out of tree preservation and teaching proper pruning techniques. Currently, Plant Amnesty is lobbying city officials to pass a stronger Seattle tree protection ordinance which would make it illegal to remove residential trees in many instances. However, voluntary tree preservation can go a long way toward protecting the landscape beauty and value of our Pacific Northwest homes and neighborhoods. If everybody did it, we wouldn’t need that pesky ordinance.

At the Fourth Annual Historic Seattle Preservation Awards Ceremony, held at the Good Shepherd Center in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood on May 15, 2012, The Friends of Seattle’s Olmsted Parks (FSOP) received the Community Advocacy Award for the Volunteer Park Landmark Designation. One of eight awards given by Historic Seattle in 2012, the Community Advocacy Award commemorates FSOP’s hard work first to prepare the Landmark Nomination document for Volunteer Park and then to lead it through the review and approval process by Seattle’s Board of Landmark Preservation.

The Landmark Board applauded our presentation of the nomination in September, 2011, voting unanimously to approve the nomination and later to designate Volunteer Park as a Seattle landmark. As a board member and then president of FSOP from 2008-2011, I led a 5-year long committee effort to research and write the nomination and submit it to the Landmark board. The other three committee members contributing to the nomination are past FSOP treasurer and chief author Charlie Sundberg; past FSOP vice president and co-author Sue Nicol; and current president and editor Jennifer Ott, who graciously received the award on behalf of FSOP at the May 15 ceremony.

In a beautifully produced booklet for the awards ceremony, Historic Seattle wrote: “The Community Advocacy Award goes to the Friends of Seattle’s Olmsted Parks (FSOP) for the arduous work involved in preparing a complex and successful landmark nomination application for Volunteer Park. The organization’s documentation of this complicated and highly significant cultural landscape serves to insure the preservation of Volunteer Park and fosters the on-going recognition of our unique citywide Olmsted legacy. Realizing that Volunteer Park was the most comprehensively designed and faithfully preserved component within the citywide Olmsted-designed plan for the Seattle Park system, FSOP board members prepared…an impressive 110-page document that provides a thorough description of the park’s landscape features and elements as a whole, as well as specifically documents various component buildigns, structures, monuments and water features and small-scale design elements. It includes in-depth contextual information regarding the national, local and neighborhood significance of the Seattle work of the Olmsted firm and the history and evolution of the park itself.”

In 2010 I had the opportunity to design a garden terrace for an intriguing mid-century modern house in Inverness, a north Seattle neighborhood. Designed in 1962 by renowned architect Jack Morse, who was a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and a University of Washington professor of architecture, the house was sponsored by Georgia Pacific Corporation as the “Century 21 Idea House” for “House & Garden” magazine. Publishing in the August, 1962 edition of “House and Garden,” Georgia Pacific, Jack Morse and the magazine all clearly intended to ride the tide of publicity raised by “Century 21,” the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair. Now as Seattle celebrates the 50th anniversary of the fair, it’s timely to unveil the house and garden renovation.

The original house featured pyramidal skylights over four quadrants of the nearly square floor plan: the living room, bedroom wing, kitchen and garage. In subsequent years, the garage was converted to a family room and an independent garage was built near the southwest corner of the house. Moving the garage freed up the original driveway to be converted for landscape use, and the south garden area was created. By 2010, this space needed a sensitive landscape renovation. Working closely with the new owners, I created a design that embraced both the confident modernism of the house and the Northwest Japanese flavor of the existing garden.

One of the best features of Jack Morse’s original house design was a flush concrete perimeter band framing the entire structure, inset in places with a band of river rock. We kept this striking feature and introduced new paving of Abbottsford “Texada” pre-cast concrete pavers in a striped pattern with two colors. The garden features a Coral Bark Maple and a candle oil-fueled fire table from Restoration Hardware.

The landscape installation was by Performance Landscape Company.

Excer

House From the Garden Terrace (Photograph by Holly Johnson)

Garden Terrace viewed from the family room (photograph by Holly Johnson)

Detail of the garden terrace (photograph by Brooks Kolb)

Restoration Hardware Laguna Fire Table (photograph by Restoration Hardware; location shown is not in the Century 21 Idea House garden)

In the July 13 issue of Alaska Airlines Magazine entitled “Home Green Home: the benefits of sustainable living,” Seattle Landscape Architect Brooks Kolb contributed his thoughts on “gardening with a sustainable thumb.” Accompanied by a photograph of Brooks Kolb’s Laurelhurst Hillside Garden, the article summarizes some of the leading principles of energy conservation in residential architectural design as well as landscape design.

Brooks was quoted saying, “There’s always a trade-off or conflict between the goal to be sustainable and the goal to meet your dream of what you want your landscape to be.” Actually, there doesn’t need to be a conflict. Often it’s a matter of communicating to a client how their dream landscape can be simultaneously designed to be sustainable. For example, if someone has their heart set on a stone path and steps and they’ve found a beautiful Chinese granite, it could be a matter of showing them how a locally sourced stone can be just as beautiful. The energy saved by eliminating the need for shipping from halfway around the world can be substantial.

As writer Lyna Bort Caruso summarized it, Brooks’ “design philosophy is to support what clients request, but to also nudge them in a greener direction that can help reduce watering and gardening bills, too. This may include using local materials wherever practical; reducing the size of lawns and leaving grass cuttings behind to serve as a natural fertilizer; installing a rain garden, which allows rainwater to collect and channel off into yards; and avoiding pesticides and herbicides to protect the groundwater from pollutants.”

Brooks Kolb’s landscape designfor a weekend getaway home on Hood Canal is featured in the October, 2013 issue of “Coastal Living” Magazine.

The on-line story, titled “A Quaint Retreat,” displays only this dining room image looking out to the canal and the Olympic Mountains beyond, but the print version includes several exterior shots showcasing my landscape design. Titled “Paradise Found,” the print version summarizes the project in a subtitle, explaining that “The serene, blissful setting of a waterfront Holly, Washington abode brings back happy memories of a homeowner’s childhood on the coast.”

This unique garden in the village of Holly, Washington features not only a beach and an upland forest lining a long driveway, but also a small wetland and an active salmon stream. Restoration of the salmon stream was a key part of the project, involving both re-sculpting the creek banks and islands and clearing a major culvert under the Seabeck-Holly Road, adjacent to the property. After the restoration was completed, salmon returned to the creek in droves.

The project team included Andrew Borges, architect; Tom and Kathy Smayda, hydraulic engineers and wetland biologists; and Robin Richie, landscape contractor. The interiors are by Michelle Burgess. Photograph by John Ellis.

The Entry Gates – all photos by Seattle Times Photographer, Mike Siegel

Seattle Landscape Architect Brooks Kolb was once again featured in the Seattle Times’ “Pacific NW” Magazine on September 7, 2014, in an article by the noted Times garden writer, Valerie Easton. Titled “Growing Gracefully, A Redesign mixes the best of old and new,” the column lead with the following paragraphs:

“It’s not often a landscape architect gets another shot at a garden he designed years ago. But when horticulturist Sue Nicol was hired to come up with a fresh plant palette for an aging Capitol Hill garden, she asked Brooks Kolb to collaborate with her on the project. And it turns out that Kolb, along with his partner, Bill Talley, had renovated the garden in 1997 for an earlier owner.” ….New owners Don and Marty Sands “remodeled the (1932 brick Tudor) inside and out, then turned their attention to updating the garden. The couple appreciated the dramatic entry gates, as well as the matuing Japanese maples, Korean dogwoods and Hinoki cypress from the earlier renovation. Marty loves how the garden wraps around the house ‘like a little haven.’ And she calls the majestic copper beech that dominates the scene ‘a Grandfather tree.’”

Since the house is located on the corner of a curving street near Interlaken Boulevard, Brooks loved the original opportunity to remove a scruffy lawn, replacing it with a path that curves parallel to the road, connecting several distinct garden rooms along the way.

All photos by Seattle Times Photographer, Mike Siegel: The House and Rockery from the Street; the Entry Gates

The Birdbath with Japanese Forest Grass; Owners Marty and Don Sands

The Fountain in 1997; The Fountain Today, with its Lily Bud Jet

Inteviewing Brooks, Valerie asked, “What was it like for Kolb to re-imagine a garden he designed long ago? ‘It’s a wonderful chance to come back in and retool a garden,’ he says. He planted a necklace of new daphnes around the old fountain and left alone the huge white wisteria growing on the hefty arbor at the side of the house.”

Brooks also relished the opportunity to work collaboratively with Sue Nicol, whose contributions to the jointly designed planting plan included the “intensely fragrant” Daphne bholua and ‘Korean Apricot’ chrysanthemums, among many other selections. Brooks has collaborated with Sue for her horticultural and arborist expertise on a number of Seattle area garden designs.